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The African nation of Tanzania has a booming business selling fish to Europe, but its citizens live in a state of horrific poverty and degradation. Filmmaker Hubert Sauper uses his documentary Darwin'... read more read more...s Nightmare to explore the lives of these people, and those who come from other countries to do business. As the film explains, sometime in the 1960s, some unknown party introduced Nile Perch into Lake Victoria, setting an ecological downward spiral in motion. The aggressively predatory fish consumed nearly every other species in the lake. The perch grew to enormous size, creating a booming business selling tons of filets to Europe. But few of the locals make a decent living from this thriving business. The fishermen and others work under dangerous conditions, earn subsistence wages, and are often unable to support their families. Those children live in the street, scavenging for food. The girls often become prostitutes, servicing the foreign pilots who bring in arms for conflicts in other regions, and fly out with the fish, leaving behind only the rotting carcasses and heads, which many of the locals cannot even afford to eat. As disease spreads and famine threatens, the ecology of the lake deteriorates, since the smaller fish that eat algae and waste are no longer there to maintain the water's purity. Darwin's Nightmare won a European Film Award for Best Documentary in 2004. The film was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in the 2005 edition of New Directors/New Films. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

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83% liked it

5,211 ratings

Critics

92% liked it

52 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 47 min.

Directed by: Hubert Sauper

Release Date: December 16, 2005

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DVD Release Date: June 26, 2007

Stats: 343 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (343)

  • gator681
    August 28, 2005
    gator681
    [font=Century Gothic]"The Untold Story of Emmitt Louis Till" is a documentary about 14-year old Emmitt Louis Till, who was tortured and lynched while on vacation with relatives in Mississippi in 1955. This and the failure to convict the killers in a courtroom were one of the mai... read moren sparks of the Civil Rights Movement. This documentary really does not provide any new information and simply relies on talking heads and archival material.(One of the interviews is with Till's mother who provides the emotional core of the movie.) The most informative parts involve Till's funeral in Chicago and the preparations for that. There is a very odd coda, though. The main point of this documentary is that there are few things more powerful than a mother's grief.[/font]
    [font=Century Gothic][/font]
    [font=Century Gothic][color=navy]"Darwin's Nightmare" is a powerful documentary about the thoroughly catastrophic ecosystem of Lake Victoria in Tanzania, a country on the edge of famine as it is. Some years before, Nile Perch were introduced into the lake which not only killed off all the other fish in the lake but also cannibalize themselves. Humans are affected because if they do not have one of the relative handful of jobs involved with the catching and processing of the fish(which are all shipped off to Europe without anything beneficial in return), then they must turn to prostitution, find some other way to survive or starve. But even for the people who do work, life can be risky - HIV/AIDS is rampant, fishing is itself dangerous and the local airport's primitive conditions make things a little risky trying to take off and land. The movie interviews people involved like factory managers, airport security, Russian pilots, a prositute, a minister and a local artist.(No outside experts are interviewed but we can see for ourselves that something is seriously wrong here.) My only complaint is that none of the people lucky enough to work in the factory are interviewed to get a sense of how their lives are. This is an excellent documentary about neo-colonialist attitudes that allow for people to make a buck at the expense of other people they have no interest in helping.[/color][/font]
  • iamthethinman
    August 17, 2009
    iamthethinman
    The second of two depressing documentaries I watched in a row.

    You can?t blame the movie for the infinitely interesting subject and great interviews with people, but the movie just seems to trapse through and record what happens and but it together in happenstance. It could have... read more benefited from better editing. But there are so many opinions and character portraits with this scenario. And following Lisa (?), who has one of a few personal and emotional stories was tragically lucky. It really sucks, this whole situation, and needed to see the light of day.

    However, my favorite parts of this movie were seeing all the crashed planes and makeshift fixing of the machines ? and these things fly over our heads and can fall. And, the captions/title cards that introduce people and situations. They were hilarious.
  • flixsterbum
    December 21, 2007
    flixsterbum
    "I want all child of world to be happy. I just don't know how to do it." These are the words of a Russian pilot who flies 500 tons of Nile perch out of Mwanza airport while the local residents starve to death. And that basically sums up this movie. The situation around Lake V... read moreictoria in Tanzania is one giant cluster. A huge fish not native to the lake has killed off every other fish and now eats its own young. Meanwhile, the locals starve, subsisting on the heads of these fish while the choice cuts get shipped off to Europe. HIV and AIDS run rampant, orphans huff melted fish packaging, and women prostitute themselves to survive. And local politicians complain that they need more positive images of their country to be exported rather than focusing on the problems at hand and European Union representatives are either woefully or willfully ignorant of the situation. It's a frustrating film to watch as it seems like things are so messed up that there doesn't seem to be any possible solution. A great documentary, just unbelievably bleak. Side note: best to watch this with complete English subtitles as the English accents are many times so thick as to be nearly unintelligible.
  • rfpojman
    October 19, 2007
    rfpojman
    My favorite film of 2006. Demonstrates the dark side of globalism from poverty and a devastatingly unsustainable food chain to organized crime.
  • victorwantsrevenge
    July 13, 2007
    victorwantsrevenge
    Probably a good documentary, but the shooting style and narrative of the piece rubbed me wrong and made the whole story uninteresting to me. Lost me about ten minutes in.
  • MisterMarvelous
    July 2, 2007
    MisterMarvelous
    This was extremely hard to watch... in fact it was downright brutal. It focuses on the horrible conditions that a community lives in just to produce a certain type of fish to export. The people are paid shit and live like animals... while the people exporting the fish from thier ... read morelake are getting rich. They are basically getting exploited in the worst way possible just so that people can have the luxury of this one type of fish. It's enough to make you want to disown the human race. Everyone should see this just to raise awareness of what consumer demands in rich nations can do to the societies that must produce these goods.
  • Michael9636
    December 28, 2006
    Michael9636
    This is another one of the countless stories of how the white man continues to rape Africa and its people - stripping it of anything of value.

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Critic Reviews

John Monaghan
March 31, 2006
John Monaghan, Detroit Free Press

The movie prefers to show snippets of life and let the audience make the connections. Many of these scenes prove memorable. Full Review

David Denby
February 28, 2006
David Denby, New Yorker

If Sauper is fired up by anti-globalist conviction, his instincts as an artist and as a man rule out any kind of rhetoric or cheapness.

Owen Gleiberman
February 15, 2006
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Darwin's Nightmare is an urgent, horrific, yet at times oddly blinkered vision of the crisis of modern Africa. Full Review

Kenneth Turan
February 9, 2006
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

It immerses you in its reality one toe at a time, until suddenly you are in over your head, gasping for air as the horror of the situation reveals itself in all its savage devastation. Full Review

Roger Moore
December 2, 2005
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

This, Sauper's film says without words, is what the human race has evolved into -- the developed world preying on the undeveloped to the extent that people suffer and die so that two million fillets a... Full Review

December 2, 2005
Boston Globe

[A] despairing, essential documentary. Full Review

Ann Hornaday
December 1, 2005
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Darwin's Nightmare is many things, including an environmental cautionary tale, a critique of globalization and a portrait of a community, country and continent in deep crisis. Full Review

G. Allen Johnson
October 14, 2005
G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle

Sauper's documentary is meant to reveal first-hand the devastating effects of globalization -- at least, an irresponsible form of it -- on a poor, foreign culture, and for the most part it succeeds. Full Review

Colin Covert
October 13, 2005
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

As much a sociological horror movie as a documentary, this artfully chilling film examines what happens to a nation's environment, economy and political ecology when the law of the jungle is allowed f... Full Review

Michael Booth
September 30, 2005
Michael Booth, Denver Post

Becomes Errol Morris's bad dream -- a documentary apparently uninterested in any factual basis for its arguments. Full Review

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